The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  Late that afternoon, leaving the dinosaur bus parked in town, the caravan moved west from DZ, led by a car driven by the museum director from Mandalgovi. She had changed out of her pretty work dress and now wore Juicy Couture sweats, huge sunglasses, driving gloves, and pearls. She led the caravan through the undulating Gobi for half an hour, through sage and low hills, zigzagging along old trails and making new ones, the landscape a flat-open nothing. Around eight thirty, as the sun spread fire along the unbroken horizon, a ger came into view. A couple hundred yards from the ger, across a slope, stood two more gers, set side by side.

  In the flat gravelly pasture behind the gers, nomads were milking their horses. Horses are a sign of wealth, and this family owned dozens. Mongolian horses are short, stocky, fast, and strong, with long tails and manes. Herder families breed and race them, and consider them kin. A herd of them, tied together along a rope stretched between rough-hewn poles, is an iconic Mongolian image. The dust kicked up by these horses’ shuffling hooves hung as a gauzy filter, backlit by the setting sun. A young girl hustled back and forth from ger to herd with a pail, collecting and dumping milk to make airag. Family members took turns pumping the barrel of liquid. A young boy who had just fallen from a horse while racing and had been dragged sat bloodied and sniffling on the man side of the ger.

  The family included the father, his elderly mother, his teenage daughter, the boy, and, somewhere in South Korea, his wife, who worked there. Relatives and helpers lived in the other two gers. Bolor had seen the family a year earlier and was excited to reunite. “We are going to party!” she had said, gleefully describing (but not expecting) a pastime in which people drink airag until they have to press their stomach and projectile-vomit, then start drinking again.

  After dark, as the main ger filled with people, the father took his place at the head of the room in a work deel and a brimmed field hat. A single bare bulb, powered by either a generator or solar panels, dimly lit the space. It didn’t seem possible that so many people could fit, but fit they did, twenty men, women, and children, sitting on the beds and the ground. Everyone watched as the patriarch asked his guests questions. Where is your husband? Do you have children? Why are there holes in your pants? He tried to tell one visitor’s fortune and gave up, saying he was no good with the palms of foreigners. Everyone passed a snuff bottle and played a hand game that resembled Rock, Paper, Scissors, and occasionally they sang. Bolor said, “Nomads are really good singers.”

  At one point someone asked if the family knew any dinosaur diggers. No, but one had heard that a champion wrestler once bought a complete dinosaur for 25 million tugrik, and that buyers came from Ulaanbaatar and paid diggers with motorcycles as well as cash. A guide named Selenge explained that a lot of Mongolians believed the law allowed them to keep fossils that weren’t the subject of research or study. She knew of a guy who had a dinosaur egg at home. “Someday they can sell it,” she said. “So this family keeping this egg, like treasure.”

  At eleven thirty, supper was ready. Bolor got back into one of the vehicles and rode across the dark pasture to the lone ger, where a couple lived with their small children. The wife was removing freshly roasted goat from the coals and dropping the pieces into a large aluminum bowl. Each visitor was handed a rock still slick and fragrant with goat fat and told to toss it hand to hand like a hot potato. “Good for health, especially women’s health,” said Selenge.

  Sitting on the floor, the guests ate from the bowl. After a round of vodka sipped from a small silver cup, the drivers went outside to sleep beneath the vast and twinkling desert sky. Everyone else spread sleeping bags in a row on the floor, beneath hanging strips of drying meat. Bodies lay side by side like packaged frankfurters, with their feet to the bowl of goat bones and the moon shining through the open door.

  Bolor walked out into the night to relieve herself before going to bed. Her headlamp shone a path through a patch of grass. When she flicked it off, it was too dark to see even a hand held directly in front of her face. Nearby, large, invisible creatures snorted and softly stomped in the dirt.

  In the morning, the breakfast smoke puffed up and out. A young boy was already awake and training a horse. A herder drove a sheep herd by motorcycle. A man in a deel came riding in to capture a beautiful blond colt; he hooked her with a noose on a long pole and another guy tried to throw on a harness. They soon got the colt saddled and began the process of breaking her.

  The old grandmother wore a pink deel and a blue headscarf and carried her orange milking stool around with her, sitting for obligatory photos in regal silence. After Bolor presented everyone with gifts, the grandmother offered curd cakes. As the party convoyed out, the captured colt could be seen clipped to the tie-line, her feet bound together, bucking.

  The path from Dalanzadgad to the Flaming Cliffs runs west-northwest over pebbly plain. The drivers followed the ghost roads, which followed telephone wires, which are the best means of navigation in deep snow. They passed birds taking dust baths and the sun-bleached skulls of camels. The wind picked up, strong and cold, buffeting the sage.

  The pink sky blued, signaling sunset. The caravan came to a tourist ger camp with a bathhouse and a dining room. The sun was dropping as if being pulled steadily by ropes from below the horizon. When a double rainbow appeared, everyone rushed onward in the vehicles to see the spectacle of Bayanzag, the Flaming Cliffs, in such remarkable last light.

  The next morning, Bolor was finishing her breakfast when someone came running into the dining ger to say that some tourists had found dinosaur eggs. She jumped up and said, “Maybe I will make an arrest!”

  At the Flaming Cliffs, she parked in a gravel lot high above the canyons, where locals set up tables and sell random stones and trinkets. The regional tourism director was already there. He followed Bolor as she followed a pair of tourists along a narrow ledge, around an outcrop, and seemingly off the edge of a cliff. The tourists—a young American couple—pointed out a place in a bluff where they had spotted unusual objects poking out of the rock. Bolor peered somberly at the site as cameras followed her every move.

  “Thank you very much letting us know,” she later told the tourists. “If you know, we have a lot of fossil localities. The fossils are too rich—anybody can find. But we have a poaching problem. What you found was an egg nest, Oviraptor nest. Are you from States?”

  They said they were.

  “Which city?”

  Chicago.

  Bolor discovered that she had just explained paleontology to a Northwestern University paleobotanist, Dr. Rosemary Bush, and her husband, a particle physicist, Dr. Steve Won. The couple was vacationing with Bush’s parents and her brother and sister. Their discovery had happened the day before. Bush and Won had walked down into a wash, which Bush later described as a place “drooling with fossils.” As Won, a rock climber, took a vertical approach toward a ridge he had spotted objects that looked like potatoes protruding from the rock. “Those are eggs,” Bush had said when she saw them.

  She had dug out five of the eggs, worried that if she left them behind “they would wind up in some Chinese businessman’s living room.” When she and Won carried them to the parking lot, their guide went wild. Dinosaur eggs were first discovered by Americans right here in this place! And now Americans had found more! This is so important for Mongolia! You come back here in five or ten years and everybody will know you! The discovery had happened at roughly the same time the double rainbow appeared, so the day was surely blessed.

  Bush and Won had taken the eggs to their ger camp and arranged them in a row on placemats in the dining room, for photos. Bush always traveled with her Geological Society of America scale card; she laid the ruler next to each egg, noting that the largest measured roughly 8 inches long. The camp’s owner hoped to keep the eggs as a tourist attraction. People were always coming to the place where so many dinosaurs had been discovered, only to see no fossils at all.

  Bolor had been thinking the same thing. Maybe that’s
where all of this—the poaching, the politics, the T. bataar case, the bus, the newfound attention on Mongolia—had been leading. The Gobi Desert, scene of some of the world’s greatest paleontological discoveries, had a viable opportunity for its first real dinosaur museum. Now was the time.

  The next morning, as Bolor pulled out of camp, her hosts ladled horse milk onto her tires, for luck.

  EPILOGUE

  Roy Chapman Andrews went home to New York City and became the director of the American Museum of Natural History. Yvette had divorced him on March 31, 1931, in Paris, on grounds of desertion—exploration, it seems, had come first in his life. They had two sons, George and Kevin. In 1935, the year after taking the AMNH directorship, Andrews married Wilhelmina “Billy” Christmas, the widow of a Manhattan stockbroker. They kept a city apartment and bought an old farm in North Colebrook, Connecticut, naming it “Pondwood.” By the time Andrews resigned, on November 10, 1941, he had spent over thirty years at the museum, twenty-eight of them in the field. The directorship had been an honor, but bureaucracy made him miserable. “I did not react well to confinement…,” he wrote. “I was like a wild animal that had been trapped late in life and put into a comfortable cage.” The New York Times marked his departure by praising his “unfailing gift for dramatizing his scientific adventures.” Andrews “not only made the Museum a vital force in scientific education but he brought the public flocking to it, because people found its colorful halls one of the most fascinating vistas in the city scene.”

  In 1953, he published All About Dinosaurs, a book that delighted and inspired future paleontologists, including Philip Currie and Mike Novacek. The Andrewses eventually moved to Carmel Valley, California. At one point Roy was asked why the museum had never returned the fossils collected by the Central Asiatic Expeditions—Mongolia still occasionally complained that the Gobi fossils had been stolen. A “perfectly ridiculous” allegation, said Andrews, who by then was seventy-two. The Gobi dinosaur egg that he had auctioned off for $5,000 to fund future research remains at Colgate University, where it is used for scientific study. The egg is the centerpiece of the Robert M. Linsley Geology Museum, in the Robert H. N. Ho Science Center. In October 2009, it was put on public display, behind a “high-level security system,” for the first time since 1957, the year that a couple of Colgate students tried to steal it.

  Andrews died of a heart attack on March 11, 1960, in Carmel, and was buried in his hometown of Beloit, Wisconsin. Late in life, he had become fond of a place that most reminded him of Mongolia: Tucson, Arizona. In 2015, a small auction house in Sarasota, Florida, sold off a batch of his former possessions.

  Mark Norell continues to lead the AMNH’s vertebrate paleontology department, working out of the tower where Roy Chapman Andrews applied for his first job and later returned as museum director. The museum continues its annual research in the Gobi Desert in collaboration with the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. When Michael Novacek published Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs in 1996, he noted that the opening provided by the fall of Communism wasn’t “necessarily permanent,” explaining, “It’s a window of opportunity, one that could close without warning in this chimerical world.” Thousands of Mongolian fossils remain at the American Museum of Natural History, where materials from the Central Asiatic Expeditions of the 1920s are still on exhibit, used for study, and stored in the museum’s collection.

  Philip Currie was feted by the Mongolian government for his part in bringing the T. bataar skeleton back to Mongolia. He went on working in the Gobi and in Alberta, Canada. In September 2015, the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum opened, five hours northwest of Edmonton. The actor Dan Aykroyd—who had hunted fossils with Currie, as had other celebrities such as the crime novelist Patricia Cornwell and Criminal Minds star Matthew Gray Gubler—opened the event with a motorcycle ride. The museum “received almost every award and citation that could be thrown at it,” but within a year showed signs of financial stress owing, some thought, to its remote location.

  In the fall of 2015, Oyungetel “Oyuna” Tsedevdamba visited the American Museum of Natural History to demand the return of Mongolian fossils, in what appeared, to some, to be opportunistic political theater because she arrived with a film crew. She lost her position as minister of tourism when the Mongolian government changed leadership again, but continues to work as an activist and author. She is expected to one day again run for public office.

  Bolor had talked about writing children’s books about Mongolian dinosaurs, but it was Oyuna who got there first. As a gift to the newly created Central Museum of Mongolian Dinosaurs, she turned her impromptu dinosaur tale—the one she told at the pop-up exhibit’s opening at Sukhbaatar Square—into a soft-cover book, A Story of Tarbosaurus Bataar. The book was printed in Mongolian and English and sold in the gift shop. As the story goes: Once upon a time… there was one young and adventurous dinosaur called Tarbosaurus bataar. He dreamed, “One day I will be famous and make friends with children of human beings still to be born.…” Millions of years later, after the T. bataar became a fossil, poachers arrived, among them a tall white guy in a backpack and jean shorts. Most of the poachers were not from the Gobi. They came from far away. So they smuggled Tarbosaurus bataar with his friends to a faraway land. President Elbegdorj and Robert Painter saved the T. bataar. The unnamed smuggler wound up on his knees in a jail cell, in the presence of an American judge. A school girl named Bolor was among the children who visited the dinosaur in the museum. Now you are a worldwide recognized hero, children told the T. bataar, who answered, I became very famous, as I wished.

  The Central Museum of Mongolian Dinosaurs opened in the summer of 2014 in the old Lenin Museum, with the T. bataar as the star attraction.

  Meanwhile, building inspectors decided the old Natural History Museum wouldn’t withstand an earthquake—significant fault lines run near Ulaanbaatar—and some ten thousand natural history items were moved into storage. The spectacular “fighting pair”—one of the most important fossils ever discovered—went to an unprotected corner of the paleontological center’s basement. As if to avoid being upstaged by the new Central Museum of Mongolian Dinosaurs, the Mongolian Academy of Sciences retracted an exhibit that was traveling overseas and mounted it at Hunnu Mall, a swank new shopping center on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar with a food court, an indoor ice skating rink, and an IMAX theater.

  Otgo went on working as the chief prepper but was looking forward to retirement. In 2015, when asked about Eric Prokopi, he said he felt bad about what had happened: “Maybe some people think I brought these people in an organized way to find fossils, but I didn’t. I just showed them the sites, that’s it. I fulfilled my duties and responsibilities [as a guide] and I don’t feel sorry, but on the other hand, as for me, I feel sorry that the people who sold him the bones are Mongolians. If Mongolian won’t sell it, he won’t buy it. He paid a lot of money to get this bones to bring to the States, and he worked with this bones and prepared it for trade, and when Mongolian government made question to the Americans, he lost what he paid for. He is in some ways a victim.”

  Tsogtbaatar continued to run the paleontology institute and lab of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. He called the new Central Museum his “headache,” saying, “These are illegal specimens. We don’t know where they came from, which layer, who found it, or when. So it’s very dangerous to use it for study. It spreads bad information in the world.” Tsogtbaatar was already worried that “people think Mongolians so crazy, so stupid” because of the T. bataar case. The new Central Museum’s role in paleontology and the public’s understanding of science—“it’s very complicated,” he said. “That museum? That’s the museum of Eric Prokopi.”

  Tuvshinjargal’s family kept the mint-green building on Peace Avenue. In the summer of 2015, they still had a travel agency on the fourth floor, where glass cases held huge geodes, their purple innards glittering. Bobo, Tuvshin’s widow, did not want to discuss her husband or his business—she had already been detaine
d once. International human rights watchers have urged the Mongolian government to enact statutes of limitations, making it impossible to charge a person for certain nonviolent crimes after a certain point, but so far that has not happened. The T. bataar case remained open. Tuvshin’s eldest son, meanwhile, turned the old dinosaur basement into a hip-hop dance studio.

  Fossil dealers don’t like talking about Tuvshin. What’s to fear? one dealer was asked. The dealer said, “Are you kidding me?” Tuvshin was the source of 90 percent of all the material coming out of Mongolia. “To me it’s just like drug dealing. He knew everything.” Jeff Falt, Oyuna’s husband, hoped the investigation would continue, especially now that Tuvshin and at least two of his known associates were dead. Some suspected that Tuvshin had been working for someone richer and more powerful, “the financier on the Mongolian side,” as Falt put it. “The cost of shipping, the cost of digging the dinosaurs out, and so on—someone was fronting the money for that. If you have a really conspiratorial bent of mind, you might wonder if he’s getting rid of witnesses.”

  The commercial community’s trade group, the Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences, announced plans to research and publicize international fossil-collecting laws in English, to counter rumors and misinformation that have always surrounded certain countries. “In most cases, there is no single agency for any country that has all of the correct information available,” George Winters, the former AAPS president recently wrote. And information often conflicts, “with one entity claiming something is legal and another stating just the opposite.” Winters wrote, “Most of the foreign agencies I have contacted cannot quote their current laws, or supply the actual documentation defining them.” Winters was also working with the paleontologist Ken Carpenter, director of the Eastern Prehistoric Museum at Utah State University, to update Collecting the Natural World, a 1997 book by Donald Wolberg and Patsy Reinard. The book, now out of print, covered the fossil regulations of all fifty U.S. states; Winter says the next edition will include a chapter on international laws.